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Rethinking History

Volume 11, Number 4, December 2007

Contents

In This Issue463 David Harlan

Article465 Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History

Philip J. Ethington

Commentaries495 Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History

Thomas Bender

501 Commentary on ‘Placing the Past: ‘‘Groundwork’’ for a Spatial

Theory of History’

David Carr

507 Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History

Edward S. Casey

513 The Limits to Emplacement: A Reply to Philip Ethington

Edward Dimendberg

517 Presenting and/or Re-Presenting the Past

Alun Munslow

Reply525 Philip J. Ethington

Forum: Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film

on History 531 Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History: An African Perspective

Vivian Bickford-Smith


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547 The Balcony of History

Robert Burgoyne

555 Back to the Future, Ahead to the Past. Film and History: A StatusQuaestionis

Leen Engelen

565 Film and History: Robert A. Rosenstone and History on

Film/Film on History

Alun Munslow

577 Critical Approaches to the History Film—A Field in Search of a

Methodology Guy Westwell

Reply589 A Historian in Spite of Myself

Robert A. Rosenstone

Forum: Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory:

The Transformation of American Remembrancein the Age of Mass Culture597 Which Prosthetic? Mass Media, Narrative, Empathy, and

Progressive Politics

James Berger

613 Why Should Historians Write about the Nature of History (Rather

Than Just Do it)?

Alun Munslow

Response627 Alison Landsberg

Notes on Contributors631

Index of Volume 11, 2007635


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ARTICLE

Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ fora Spatial Theory of History

Philip J. Ethington

This essay presents an argument that the past is the set of all places made by

human action. The past cannot exist in time: only in space. Histories

representing the past represent the places ( topoi) of human action. Knowledge

of the past, therefore, is literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of

history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime. The author’s reply to published

commentary emphasizes the multi-perspectival framework of his theory and

the non-narrative potential of visual representation of the past.

Keywords: Historical Theory; Mapping; Past; Place; Space; Time

Précis

All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of places made

by human action. History is a map of these places.

Introduction

The past cannot exist ‘in’ time, because time cannot be any sort of frame

within which anything can exist. By western definitions, time is something

other than space, and yet it is incessantly portrayed as something spatial: as

a line, a frame, a background, a landscape, and as having orientation. In

common usage, the past is behind us and the future is ahead. We speak of the distant past and the gulf of time that separates us from the ancients.

These spatial metaphors for time are ubiquitous because they are grounded

metaphors, arising from the spatial experience of time. In nature, time—by

Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 465 – 493

ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13642520701645487


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itself —has no being whatsoever. It is a mere measurement of spatial

motion. But human, or lived time is another matter. Experiential, memorial

time is very real because it takes place. The past cannot exist in time: only in

space. Histories representing the past represent the places (topoi) of humanaction. History is not an account of ‘change over time,’ as the cliché goes,

but rather, change through space. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is

literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the

coordinates of spacetime.

If historical knowledge can mean anything that is distinct from other

forms of knowledge, it must mean something about the temporal

dimension of human experience in the world. What precisely is this

temporal dimension? The experience of memory, common sense, and

material evidence all around us strongly indicates that the past did exist.What can we add, other than rendering the verb ‘to be’ in its past tense? It

is circular to say, ‘the past was.’ What is the signified of ‘the past ,’ and does

it have more than a semiotic existence?

Historians have extensively addressed the question, ‘what is history?’ and

how best to study the past. This essay begins with a far simpler question:

what is the past, that we could seek to know or represent it in any way? That

question depends unavoidably on a larger question: what is time? The

process of answering these questions leads to a robust account of experience, as action inscribing the places of the past in spacetime. It also

leads to a reconception of historical interpretation as the act of reading

places, or topoi.

This essay attempts to make a contribution to current discussions about

historical knowledge and even to knowledge in general. I advocate a new

materialism that incorporates, in good faith, two generations of

postpositivist, poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial critique, and

yet moves beyond these negations into a practice that can, in principle,

achieve cumulative knowledge through intercultural dialogue on thecourses and meanings of the global past. Emplacing historical knowledge

entails a radical rethinking of many basic terms that have become nebulous

through shorthand use and critical neglect.

Placing the past will also help historians to navigate the most recent

‘turn’ in the human sciences, the ‘spatial turn,’ as instigated by such

thinkers as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey,

Edward Soja, and Edward Casey. Bookshelves groan under the weight of

recent discussions of place and space among geographers, anthropologists,and sociologists (Agnew & Duncan 1989; Feld & Basso 1996; Gieryn 2000;

Low & Laurence-Zúñiga 2003; Cresswell 2004; Hubbard et al . 2004).

Amazingly, in the face of all this, almost nothing has been written in the last

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three generations by historians directly on the concept of time. I have come

to realize that historians cannot merely borrow new ideas about place and

space without first conducting a searching examination of their own

discipline’s home dimension of temporality . Just beginning this necessary and long-overdue task may lead to some exciting new possibilities for

historical knowledge that can overcome the fragmentations of perspectival

contingency.

Before the spatial turn even joined the list of ‘turns’ in the late 1980s,

philosophers, critical theorists, intellectual historians, and others had

developed a very advanced debate about the possibilities of producing

knowledge of society. This was not a debate between some naive believers in

objective, scientistic value-neutral knowledge on one hand, and relativistic

poststructuralists, on the other, as in Peter Novick’s (1988) misleadingaccount (Kloppenberg 1989). Instead, it has been a debate among those

who all agree that we are in a post-foundational age, aware that linguistic

construction, cultural difference, and historical contingency have elimi-

nated the possibility of appealing to timeless, underlying truths, impartial

epistemological methods, and the positive accumulation of uncontested

knowledge.

Concerned primarily with the possibilities of knowing the past, I shall

build my case by remapping the past of knowing. My starting point is therise of the pragmatic-hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Wilhelm

Dilthey in Germany and William James in the United States, in the closing

decades of the 19th century. In that tradition, knowledge of the past lost its

atemporal universality and the foundations of universal truth began to

crumble. In temporality and historicity, the contingency of knowledge

became inescapable. The linguistic turn further separated knowing from the

past by adding the semiotic critique of representation to those of historicity

and contingency. These traditions branched into several intellectual

pathways. Dilthey’s historicism was recast by Heidegger, who radicalizedHusserl’s phenomenology into a temporalization of human being, and then

by Derrida, who added semiotics to produce a radical deconstruction of

knowledge. James’ and John Dewey’s closely related pragmatism branched

into reconstructive and radically skeptical positions on the possibilities

of knowledge, represented by Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty,

respectively.

I shall argue that a cornerstone of the pragmatic tradition: temporality as

construed by fin-de-siècle hermeneutics—is in need of reconstruction now that the spatial turn has been added to the linguistic and cultural turns. My

interrogation of ‘time’ will lead back into space and place, through

historical regions yet unexplored by the current state of the spatial turn.

Rethinking History 467


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From Timeless Historians to an Account of Time

If anything is obvious about the practice of historical research and writing,

it is that ‘time’ is the discipline’s most defining feature. For historians, thequestion ‘what is time?’ is so basic and essential to our craft that it should

be a cause for wonder that historians have evaded it almost completely and

for so long. History has been as active as any other discipline in probing its

most profound issues of theory and method. The major essayists on the

historian’s craft, from Carl Becker ([1931] 1966) and Marc Bloch (1953) to

E. H. Carr (1961), Fernand Braudel (1980), Siegfried Kracauer (1969),

David Hackett Fischer (1970), David Lowenthal (1985), Joan Wallach Scott

(1988), Pierre Nora (1996), Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob

(1994), Alun Munslow (2000), and most recently, John Lewis Gaddis(2002), show us the necessary limits and also the open possibilities for

interpreting and representing the past. I can neither summarize these

important works, nor improve on them. Rather, I wish to show that by

exposing the ontologic status of time, the questions that all of these works

address will take on a new light.

Fernand Braudel’s influential scheme of three time scales went farther

than most attempts by historians to define the time of the past. In The

Mediterranean and elsewhere, Braudel argued that human history iscomposed of three types of time, each ‘one aspect of the whole.’ In the

conclusion to The Mediterranean, he wrote of

an attempt to write a new kind of history, total history, written in threedifferent registers, on three different levels, perhaps best described asthree different conceptions of time, the writer’s aim being to bringtogether in all their multiplicity the different measures of time past, toacquaint the reader with their coexistence, their conflicts and contra-dictions, and the richness of experience they hold. (Braudel 1972, II,

p. 1238)

The first of these three Braudelian conceptions is the Longue durée: ‘a

history whose passage is almost imperceptible,1 that of man in his

relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow,

a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.’ The second type of

time is also a long time span, but less daunting. This conjunctural history:

‘histoire conjuncturelle,’ as Braudel came to call it, is a time of ‘slow but

perceptible rhythms . . . one could call it social history, the history of groups and groupings’ (1972, I, p. 20, italics in original). The third type, a

‘histoire événémentielle,’ deals with the ‘short time span, proportionate to

individuals, to daily life, to our illusions, to our hasty awareness—above

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all the time of the chronicle and the journalist . . .’ (1980, p. 28). ‘But the

worst of it,’ Braudel added,

is that there are not merely two or three measures of time, there aredozens, each of them attached to a particular history. Only the sum of these measures, brought together by the human sciences (turnedretrospectively to account on the historian’s behalf) can give us that totalhistory whose image it is so difficult to reconstitute in its entirety. (1972,II, p. 1238)

Braudel’s brilliant pluralization of time scales emerged from his

attempt to see the history of a place, which his training under Lucien

Febvre had taught him to see geographically and led to his ‘homage to those

timeless realities whose images recur throughout the whole book’ (1972, II,p. 1239).

The thesis that the time of the past must have multiple scales and

simultaneous, yet inharmonious, rhythms, was also developed by the art

historians Henri Focillon ([1934] 1992) and George Kubler (1962), and

further elaborated by Siegfried Kracauer (1969). Neither Braudel nor

Kracauer, however, went further than to subdivide ‘time’ into multiple

registers. Left whole as a single timeline, stratified into three or twelve layers

by Braudel’s ‘depth metaphor’ (Megill 1989) or separated into differentrhythms, time has remained unquestionably necessary as a frame or

background for historians to situate ‘the past.’

The most recent, and most suggestive, case of portraying the past as a

background is John Lewis Gaddis’ recent Oxford lectures (2002),

comparing the past to a landscape, as a simile or analogy . Gaddis

convincingly shows that the production of historical knowledge is very

much ‘like’ that of a cartographer: the need to operate at different scales, to

contextualize, to generalize and particularize simultaneously, to skip time

periods and to portray non-adjacent places. But, when Gaddis freely admitsthat he is only offering a simile, he begs the question of what the object of

that simile is: if the past is only like a landscape, then what is it?

To be sure, historians have studied the social and intellectual history of

time as perceived, conceived, and lived by past societies (Kern 1983; Pocock

1989; Haraven 1991; Landes 2000), but amazingly, even these historians

have left the entire question of time as such—the time that makes it

meaningful for them to say anything at all about ‘the past’—unexamined.

To historicize anything, including time, requires some assumptions aboutthe nature of time to the historicizing historian. The mother of all

assumptions has been that ‘time’ is a static background, transcendent in its

universality. For all their vast differences, the philosophers Kant, Husserl



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and Heidegger took the stand that time is transcendent a priori (Dostal

1993), so historians can hardly be blamed for doing so.

Most commonly, historians simply confuse time with chronology and

chronometry—the ‘time’ of calendars and clocks. No one seriously debateswhether the 18th century came before the 20th, nor that Denis Diderot

lived before Jean-Paul Sartre, so this framework called ‘time’ remains

reassuringly stable, unproblematic, and consensual. But this convenient

evasion tells us nothing about what time actually is, and without knowing

that, we cannot ask: what is the past, or history, to time? An excellent

starting point is Paul Ricoeur’s (1984 – 1988) distinction between cosmic or

natural time—that which seems to occur throughout the universe,

independent of humanity; and human or lived time: time as conceived,

perceived, and experienced by individuals and their societies, as forexample in the studies of ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992; Nora 1996;

Confino 1997; Klein 2000; Kansteiner 2002). As my argument proceeds, I

hope to make it clear that these two types of time actually converge by

intersecting in places (topoi).

Natural Time

To physicists, cosmic or natural time is only part of relativistic ‘spacetime,’a large-scale structure postulated by Hermann Minkowski and Albert

Einstein. Since humans do not yet travel at speeds nearing that of light,

historians can be forgiven for not worrying too much about the behavior of

time under conditions other than the plodding Newtonian rotations and

orbits of the Earth, which tick off the days and years. Even less do they

need, on a daily basis, to ponder the bizarre issues of space and time at the

quantum level. The commonplace lesson drawn from relativity theory is

that there is no privileged perspective or frame for ‘time,’ and therefore,

that time cannot be absolute. The speed of light provides the only parameter. Quantum mechanics holds that a particle can be in two different

locations at the same time, a possibility that may have no relevance to

human affairs, but one which further confounds reassuring notions of some

standard background called ‘time’ against which history happens (Sklar

1974).

Time in nature ‘is no more than an arbitrary parameter that is used to

describe dynamics, or the mechanics of motion.’ This arbitrary parameter

has proven very difficult to standardize precisely. The basic unit used by scientists and engineers to describe these motions and to coordinate the

increasingly complex technology of society is the second , fixed in 1956

under the Système Internationale des Unités (SI) as ‘1/31,556,925.9747th of

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the orbital period of the Earth about the Sun.’ But alas, the Earth’s orbital

period actually fluctuates slightly, so that standard was replaced in 1968 by

Resolution #1 of the 13th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures

(CGPM), to be, rather, ‘9,192,631,770 cycles of the ground-state hyperfinesplitting of the unperturbed cesium atom’ (Diddams et al . 2004, p. 1318).

Paired with the basic unit of time is the basic unit of space, the SI meter,

today defined as ‘the path length traveled by light in a vacuum during the

time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second’ (Diddams et al . 2004, p. 1318).2

The original meter was born in the French Revolution as a neat subdivision

of the circumference of the Earth (to supplant earlier measures such as the

‘hand’ and the ‘foot’). Humans will calibrate motion with such arbitrary

units until the end of the world, never measuring time itself.

We never observe time isolated by itself in nature; only motion and thetraces of motions. Those traces are the innumerably various inscriptions by

natural events and by purposive beings onto their environments. Because

collective action is coordinated by cyclical repetitive motions in nature, as

in the Earth’s solar orbit or the Moon’s terrestrial orbit, it should be no

surprise that these motions and their periodicity became central to human

consciousness of time. Classified into units that vary widely by varying

conceptions of time (linear, circular, discontinuous, etc.), ‘time’ is nothing

in itself , but rather a culturally specific reading of the dynamicenvironment.

That said, natural scientists and philosophers of science have come to

agree that in the physical universe, ‘time’ (enclosed in quotes because what

follows is actually about the energies and motions of things, and not about

time as something independent) is asymmetrical : it only ‘flows’ in one

direction, and cannot be run backward as a movie can (Feynman 1965;

Savitt 1990). Hans Reichenbach (1956) demonstrated why this is so. The

argument is simply that thermodynamic processes have an infinitely higher

probability of running from low to high states of entropy (from organizedto disorganized) than from high to low states of entropy. Sugar cubes

dissolve into hot coffee, but sugar in solution with coffee is extremely

unlikely to form itself into a cube and rise to the surface. Hence, ‘the

direction in which most thermodynamical processes in isolated processes

occur is the direction of positive time’ (Reichenbach 1956, p. 127). Here

again, however, time is defined as the interval between one entropic state

and another. It is the behavior of matter and energy that is observed, not

that of time.It is easy to see, from the ‘asymmetry of time,’ that time travel is

impossible because there is no time in which to travel. Understanding the

being of the past actually depends on an understanding of why this is so.



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The spatial field of human experience is an immense, aggregate complex of

subatomic and molecular motion. To go ‘back in time’ cannot mean

anything less than forcing all of the particles in our bodies and the world

around us into the negative performance of all the motions that they had just completed. This necessarily includes the molecules of the entire planet,

because adjacent energies cannot be separated. No individual could break

free of the network of energy and matter to visit an earlier state of that

network. Either the entire planet goes backward, or nobody does. And even

if we could run the entire planet backward, it wouldn’t make a difference to

anyone, because no one would remember the difference. Memories—stored

in the neurobiological complex of the brain—would be unmade as time

went backwards, and remade as time went forward again. A different

‘present’ might result, but no one would be able to remember the original‘present.’ This kind of time travel means that the entire world must always

experience each ‘time’ for the first time. Natural or cosmic ‘time’ cannot be

a container or background of any spatial sort, in which to travel. Time is

travel.

All matter is in motion, so all space is dynamic. The only sensible term

for this environment is ‘spacetime,’ which I shall use from this point on.

Lived Time

What then of human, or experienced, time? It may be clear that time is

illusory in nature, but isn’t our experience of it in daily life, our feeling of it

passing, our conviction of it as memory, and our collective knowledge of it

as history, real? Let us now enquire whether there can be a substance to this

time, and if so, is it possible to speak of a ‘past’ as something real enough

that we can obtain knowledge of it?

Despite historians’ indifference, a mountain of philosophical and

scholarly texts since antiquity are devoted to unraveling the mystery of human and natural time (Grünbaum 1963; Sherover 1975; Carr 1986;

Flood & Lockwood 1986). Models of time—as linear, circular, eternal,

fragmentary, discontinuous—are as diverse as the cultures of the globe

(Aguessy et al . 1977; Fraser 1981). Limitations of space require me to enter

this massive background through a single regional tradition: the Euro-

American beginning of the 20th century.

In two very different ways, the philosophers J. Allen McTaggart and

Henri Bergson cast damning doubt on the ‘reality’ of the linear, or spatial,model of time. McTaggart’s influential 1908 essay, ‘The Unreality of Time,’

established the convention of distinguishing between two very different

kinds of temporal ‘series.’ In the ‘A series,’ events occur in moments that

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run from the future to the present and then into the past. In the ‘B series,’

events are either ‘earlier’ or ‘later.’ Considering ‘pastness,’ ‘presentness,’

and ‘futurity’ to be either relations among or qualities of events, McTaggart

concluded that the A series is contradictory, because past, present, andfuture are ‘incompatible determinations,’ and yet ‘every event has them all’

in that each event somehow changes its state (1908, p. 468). The A series

also clashes with the B series. The event of the death of William Shakespeare

(1616) occurred before the event of the death of Queen Anne (1714), and

remains, always, 98 years prior to the latter. Thus, these events must remain

fixed and yet they are asked to move or change states in the A series from

being future, to present, to past—to shift down the line, as it were, to make

room for new events. From this, McTaggart reasoned that time cannot be

part of reality.But McTaggart neatly dispatched from ‘reality’ only the abstract time

that corresponds to another abstraction—space. Since this time is only read

from planetary motion with everyday clocks, it cannot function like

something spatial in itself, much less something with the capacity to ‘move,’

as when time ‘passes.’ It is not a background or ground of any kind, just the

interval point-observations of bodies in motion. But neither consciousness

nor social action is possible without a real sense of time. That kind of time

was theorized vividly by Henri Bergson.Bergson cut through McTaggart’s Gordian Knot with his famous

distinction between linear time sequences and ‘duration’ (durée). In a series

of essays, books, and his immensely popular lectures at the Collège de

France, Bergson argued that ‘real time’ is essentially a human phenomenon,

since two ‘moments’ can only meaningfully constitute a temporal relation

via memory ([1890], [1896], [1907], [1922]). ‘To tell the truth, it is

impossible to distinguish between the duration, however short it may be,

that separates two instants and a memory that connects them, because

duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into whatdoes exist. This is real time, perceived and lived’ ([1922] 2002, p. 208).3 In

nature then, time in isolation quite definitely cannot exist, but in human

consciousness it must. We are left with the result that human, subjective,

psycho-socially constructed ‘time’ is real, while natural, objectively

measured ‘time’ is an illusion. Given the typical prioritization of the

physical over the imaginary, this irony deserves further attention. Indeed,

since humans are part of nature, the irony may indicate a conceptual flaw

in the distinction between human and natural time. I shall return to thispossibility later.

Certainly, if human experience is real, then the temporality of that

experience is no less real. But Bergson’s distinction between ‘real’ time and



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the abstraction of measured time, and his dismissal of the latter’s ‘spatial’

character, is fundamentally flawed and requires a historical critique.

The Time of Metaphoric Space

Bergson’s conception of ‘real time’ as duration thematized ‘the present’ as

the genuine field of human temporality. In this project he had good

company. United as ‘philosophers of life,’ Wilhelm Dilthey, William James,

and Henri Bergson successfully raised presentness in streams of time as a

critical feature of consciousness. The temporality of consciousness, in turn,

was a key feature of the pragmatic-hermeneutic project to establish the

contingency of knowledge within historic contexts. So far, so good. But I

want to reinforce these intellectual achievements by exposing the weak metaphoric spatiality deployed by the founding generation of the

hermeneutic and pragmatic traditions.

William James, whose enthusiasm for Bergson is well known,

independently developed the idea of ‘stream of consciousness’ to

characterize the indivisibility of lived time. Already in his Principles of

Psychology ([1890] 1983) he concluded his chapter on the ‘Perception of

Time’

by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration—thespecious present—varying in length from a few seconds to probably notmore than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceivedas having one part earlier and the other part later) is the originalintuition of time. Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically. ([1890] 1983, p. 603)

James’ influential account apprehends time in its ‘flow’: the present is

specious because as soon as we can think of it, it is past, and the duration of this passage has no fixed measure. As in Bergson’s durée, the specious

present seems to refute the very logic of measured time, which represents

moments as points.

‘The representations by which we possess the past and the future are

there only for us as we live in the present,’ writes Wilhelm Dilthey in his

uncompleted Critique of Historical Reason. ‘The present is always there, and

nothing is there except what emerges in it.’ ‘Nothing’ is a strong claim.

How literally can we take it? If the past is part of reality, then according toDilthey, it must exist only ‘in’ the present. ‘The present,’ continues Dilthey,

‘is the fullness of a moment of time being filled with reality; it is reality as

distinct from memory or representations of the future as found in wishes,

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expectations, hopes, fears, and strivings’ (2002, p. 215). Presenting the past

is a cornerstone of Dilthey’s philosophy of history because his goal was to

situate both the historical subject and the historian, a goal that had deep

epistemological implications.‘Action everywhere presupposes the understanding of other persons,’

Dilthey explains, ‘so at the threshold of the human sciences we encounter a

problem specific to them alone and quite distinct from all conceptual

knowledge of nature’ (2002, p. 235). Dilthey successfully enshrined

‘interpretation’ as the core method of the human sciences and therewith

erected a formidable barrier between the human and natural sciences. He

also made it clear that an endless circle would bedevil the interpreter, whose

own interpretive ‘position’ (a historically situated cultural perspective)

would also be implicated in the interpretation of others, and vice versa.Thus, Dilthey also founded ‘hermeneutics’ as a branch of philosophy

devoted to reflecting on the problems of interpretation, the goal of which is

to reach intersubjective understanding (Verstehen). Further, Dilthey

thoroughly historicized the human sciences: ‘The decisive element in

Dilthey’s inquiry,’ writes Martin Heidegger, ‘is not the theory of the

sciences of history but the tendency to bring the reality of the historical into

view and to make clear from this the manner and possibility of its

interpretation’ ([1924] 1992, p. 17).But Dilthey’s clarity regarding historical temporality is mitigated by his

lavish use of spatial metaphors, the irony of which requires serious

attention. ‘The ship of our life is carried forward on a constantly moving

stream, as it were, and the present is always wherever we enter these waves

with whatever we suffer, remember, and hope, that is, whenever we live in

the fullness of our reality’ (2002, p. 215). The lack of precision in this

sentence was perhaps intentional; Dilthey’s ‘as it were’ flags the image as

intended metaphor. But ‘wherever’ is conflated with ‘whenever.’ Through-

out his direct examination of time, Dilthey never breaks free from a basicspatial metaphorization, which he never stops to examine. ‘When we look

back at the past, we are passive; it cannot be changed . . . . But in our attitude

toward the future we are active and free . . . . thus the lived experience of

time determines the content of our lives in all directions’ (2002, p. 215).

‘Back,’ ‘toward,’ ‘directions.’ The ‘present,’ Dilthey writes, is ‘there.’ Where?

As a painter and physician whose literary creativity rivaled that of his

novelist brother, William James’ richly visual language for time perception

delivers a flood of metaphor: ‘The knowledge of some other part of thestream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge

of the present ’ ([1890] 1983, p. 571, italics in original). ‘To think a thing

past is to think it amongst the objects or in the direction of objects which at



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the present moment appear affected by this quality’ (p. 570). Without

irony, James quotes the following: ‘Le moment ou je parle est dé jà loin de

moi’ (p. 573).4 By the end of his chapter on the ‘Perception of Time,’ James

is swept away by his own spatial metaphors: ‘In short, the practically cognized present is no knife edge, but a saddle-back’ (p. 574). And finally:

‘The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older . . .’ (p. 588). Not

surprisingly, James’ otherwise compelling chapter on ‘The Perception of

Space’ (pp. 776 – 912) has nothing to say about spatial metaphors, much

less is it marked by temporal metaphors for space.5

I contend that this metaphoric entanglement with space is filled with

powerful clues as to the nature of time, and holds profound importance for

the debate about historical knowledge of the past. In their enthusiastic

embrace of temporality, the modernists of Dilthey’s generation failed toappreciate the implications of their own metaphors. Spatiality, presumably

an indispensable dimension of being, was left behind as these modernists

entered the flow of time. Dilthey and James left spatiality in the

unthematized condition of metaphor; while Bergson considered spatializa-

tion a curse and left it in negation, banishing it from ‘real time.’ Building in

part on Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics, Martin Heidegger further

radicalized the implications of Lebensphilosophie by constituting human

temporality as an ontological question. He also surpassed his predecessors inthe metaphoric evasion of spatiality.

Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] 1962) is the limit case of the

modernist prioritization of time over space. ‘Our provisional aim,’

Heidegger writes in the Preface to Being and Time, ‘is the Interpretation

of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being’

([1927] 1962, p. 1, italics in original). But the temporality of Heidegger’s

Dasein is, a priori, a transcendent dimension, as Dostal (1993) shows. Time

to Heidegger is the mother of all assumptions. It simply is, and everything

‘whatsoever’ appears to consciousness against this ‘horizon.’ Heidegger’sopus, it turns out, helps us to confront time only in an oblique way,

because Dasein can only know itself temporally. It is always already

temporal and always already being-there: ‘primordially’ ([1927] 1962, p.

385) engaged with the everyday. Despite his profound conceptualization of

being-there, and the presentness of Dasein, Heidegger is determined to keep

the spatiality of that being secondary to its temporality. Heidegger

purchased his achievement through a massive (and evasive) metaphoriza-

tion of space: Dasein is ‘already alongside’ itself, ‘ahead-of-itself,’ or ‘thrownand falling’ ([1927] 1962, pp. 141, 375, 477, italics in original).

Heidegger was not neglectful of space in Being and Time. On the

contrary, he aggressively pursued a project to temporalize it. In section 70

he writes of ‘the function of temporality as the foundation for Dasein’s

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spatiality . . .’ ([1927] 1962, p. 421, emphasis added). But an older and wiser

Heidegger admitted that his temporal existentialism had led him into a

dead end. In his 1962 essay ‘Time and Being’ (what was originally, in 1927,

supposed to be the title of the second volume of his magnum opus), hewrites: ‘The attempt in Being and Time, section 70, to derive human

spatiality from temporality is untenable’ (Krell 1995, pp. 43 – 44; Casey

1997, pp. 243 – 284; Heidegger 2002, p. 23).

I propose reading Heidegger backward: disregarding his unsustainably

transcendent temporality, literalizing his spatial metaphors, and imagining

Dasein’s horizon as that of its given spatiality, against which time becomes

meaningful. Spatiality is the missing keystone of the pragmatic-hermeneu-

tic edifice, just as temporality is its elusive foundation.

Etymologies Past and Present

The unreflective spatial metaphorization of time by the modernists was a

fateful mistake, but it can be easily explained. Spatial metaphors for time

are ‘grounded metaphors’ in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999)

terminology. It is not accidental that we use them to talk about time,

because our experience of time is movement in space. If metaphors form a

bridge between language and experience, they also open a door to escapethe prisonhouse of language, enabling us to express more than that

symbolic system can signify (Ricoeur 1981). Metaphor cuts two ways, then.

Observed historically, it illuminates the intersection of language with

experience. In communicative action, it transcends experience to enable the

creative transformation of language in purposive projects.

The metaphoric conflation of time and space is observable in the Oxford

English Dictionary ’s historical etymology of ‘the present’ and ‘the past’ (Oxford

English Dictionary Online, accessed 2003). The OED’s entry for ‘present, n.’

provides the following account: ‘Anglo-Norman and Old French, MiddleFrench present (French présent ) presence (early 13th cent. or earlier in Anglo-

Norman), thing which or person who is present (c 1225 in Old French), (in

grammar) present tense (c 1245), present time, period of time now occurring

(a1278)’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 2007). To be present and

to be in the present originally held the same meaning. This conflation is

evident today in the simple answer to a roll-call: ‘present!’

We learn the same lesson from the etymology of ‘past.’ As the past

participle of the verb ‘to pass,’ it gradually evolved a nominal form. Thespelling ‘passed’ was truncated into ‘past’ over the centuries by speakers and

writers, observable between Chaucer’s ‘The day is short, and it is passed’

(Franklin’s Tale, 1476) and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘It was past four o’clock, and

the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight’ ( Jane Eyre, 1847).



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In both of these examples, time is metaphorically represented as a spatial

passing. The nominal form of ‘the past,’ expressing ‘a time that has gone by;

a time, or all of the time, before the present,’ did not appear until about

1500, but the same spelling continued to signify a strictly spatial passing, asin Shakespeare’s ‘My lord, the enemie is past the marsh’ (Richard III , 1596),

and today’s ‘just past the next intersection’ (Oxford English Dictionary

Online, accessed 2003).

This brief look at the past of ‘the past’ shows evolution from a verb

signifying action and motion of bodies in space, to an adjective and adverb

signifying time by metaphorizing space, to a noun referring to prior times.

Withal, the temporal meaning of ‘the past’ contains a spatial understanding

of phenomena in motion: that which had ‘passed’ the observer. ‘Time’

begins to make sense again as a landscape, but only in a de-metaphorized,spatial sense. We do push off into the future with every move of our bodies,

but that ‘future’ is nothing more than the next emplacement of the bodies

of the world, leaving behind the places of the past (passed) with every new

configuration of presence. As the later Heidegger explained, even our most

fundamental verb, to be, evolved from the verb to dwell (Heidegger [1951]

1993).6

The Social Choreography of Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel was the only modernist in the hermeneutic revolution

inaugurated by Dilthey to theorize spatiality as integral to the human

sciences. His formulation is worth examining in detail because he

developed a method of linking the metaphoric with the non-metaphoric

senses of space. It provides us with a link to the historicism of Dilthey, and

thereby a direct path toward the reconstruction of that tradition. It has also

been completely ignored by the current discourse on spatiality.

Spatiality as an analytic category finally came into its own in the 1960s and1970s, with the work of Gaston Bachelard [1958], Michel Foucault [1967],

Henri Lefebvre (1974), and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977). Thanks primarily to the work

of Edward Soja (1989, 1996) and David Harvey (1989), a ‘spatial turn’ has

occurred in many of the human sciences. So successful have Soja and Harvey

been in spreading the pathbreaking ideas of Lefebvre that it is no exaggeration

to call the current discourse on spatiality ‘Lefebvrian’ (Elden 2001).

Lefebvre’s Production de l’Espace (1974; tr. The Production of Space 1991)

is justifiably admired as a deep well of insight, reworking many strands of western philosophy to interrogate the category of space from a variety of

angles. Lefebvre has contributed permanently to our conceptual tool set

with his distinction—already widely cited in the human sciences—between

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‘spatial practice’ (the practical material work carried out spatially in any

given society), ‘representations of space’ (the ways that society represents its

own spatiality), and ‘spaces of representation’ (the arts, architecture, and

other environmental texts that society deploys in its self-representation).This triad is useful in itself, but Lefebvre encloses it within an unnecessarily

convoluted tangle of neo-Hegelian ‘moments,’ comprehending, in Edward

Dimendberg’s (1998) succinct explication,

existing social space as a concrete universal containing three terms(spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation),three levels (perceived, conceived, lived), and three forms of space(absolute, historical, abstract) that particularize themselves with specificcontents at different time periods. (1998, p. 29)7

The current Lefebvrian discourse, however, ignores the pioneering spatial

thinking of Georg Simmel.8 Limitations of space force me to summarize my

much more extensive treatment of Simmel (Ethington 1997, 2005), but it is

notoriously difficult to summarize Simmel’s thought in any case. Max

Weber, Siegfried Kracauer, and Talcott Parsons all abandoned the effort,

leaving their manuscripts on Simmel unpublished (Frisby 1987, 1990, pp.

xxvi, 2; Levine 1991). His own contemporaries ‘. . . clearly found it difficult

to locate Simmel’s work within some readily recognized discipline andtradition’ (Frisby 1990, p. 2). Nevertheless, it is quite clear that his thought

is a variation on Lebensphilosophie, despite his failure to acknowledge his

deep debt to Dilthey.9

Integral to Simmel’s formal approach was his spatial understanding of

intersubjective social interaction. His distinctive treatment of social

spatiality is evident in one of his best-known essays, ‘The Stranger’

([1908] 1971). Simmel constructs ‘the stranger’ as a social form: ‘a form of

being together,’ ‘a form of union based on interaction.’ Strangeness is

‘create[ed]’ by ‘factors of repulsion and distance’ working together (Simmel[1908] 1971, p. 144). Not mobility itself, but the ‘appearance of this

mobility within a group occasions that synthesis of nearness and

remoteness which constitutes the formal position of the stranger’ (p.

145). Simmel expands this treatment of the near/far synthesis to claim that

in the stranger he has identified a feature of ‘every human relationship’:

In the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remotenessinvolved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be

succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within this relationindicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicatesthat one who is remote is near. The state of being a stranger is of coursea completely positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction. (p. 143)



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Simmel makes space work in two distinct senses in this passage: as

metaphor for intersubjective intimacy and as non-metaphoric geometric

space. ‘Closeness’ and ‘remoteness’ are at first unspecified, but after the

colon, ‘close by’ and ‘near’ are meant geometrically, while ‘remote’ is meantintersubjectively.

Simmel’s signal achievement is the fusion of metaphoric and geometric

spatiality in a single conceptual framework, one that successfully resists

hypostatizing or abstracting ‘space’ in the ways Lefebvre (1991, pp. 229 –

292) complains of. Crucial to Simmelian space is the ineluctable quality of

the ‘boundary,’ a social form that is common to both consciousness and to

society. Simmel also outlined, but did not fully flesh out, the idea that social

interactions are spatial configurations for the same reasons that

consciousness is organized (as he took from Kant) by a series of categoricalboundaries. ‘The boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological

consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially’ (Simmel

1997, p. 143). The boundary is perhaps the most suggestive aspect of

Simmelian spatiality, reflecting the indeterminate position of the subject:

‘By virtue of the fact that we have boundaries everywhere and always,’

Simmel writes, ‘so accordingly we are boundaries’ (Simmel 1971, p. 353,

italics in original).

Simmel’s ‘boundary’ is both geometrically and metaphorically spatial. Itis the intersection of these two types of spatiality, a parallel to the

pragmatists’ denial of the mind/body dualism. The spatiality of experience

complements its temporality in ways that the pragmatic-hermeneutic

tradition has not fully appreciated (in large part because Simmel’s sociology

was largely a-historic). Historians, ever indebted to Dilthey’s construction

of the human sciences, have carried forward his incomplete account of

experience, which is historical but placeless. By emplacing experience,

Simmel’s theoretically compatible handiwork repairs Diltheyan epistemol-

ogy by accounting for experience as form, with both geometric andmetaphoric spatiality.

Placing the Critique of Space

The world comes bedecked in places. It is a place-world to begin with.(Casey 1996, p. 43)

Simmel’s insistence that all social forms are in a perpetual state of dynamism through sites of interaction; his location of those forms in the

embodied self as intersection and boundary; and his refusal to reduce

contingency and plurality to system and abstraction, well suit the spirit

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of today’s post-foundational world. It is no accident that two of his

students, Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer, have returned to

prominence with such force (Frisby 1986; Schwartz 2001). Among many

other qualities, Simmel’s work makes visible the suppressed spatiality of Dilthey’s historicism. Simmel’s achievements, however, are hard to

appreciate in part because most of what he calls ‘space’ is now

understood as place, and this distinction is of major importance in

current debates.

Two very different approaches to the space – place distinction will now

be explored: Henri Lefebvre’s neo-Marxian approach and Edward Casey’s

much more radical phenomenological approach. While simplistic, it is not

misleading to say that in the current discourse, ‘place’ is good and ‘space’ is

bad. ‘Place is an organized world of meaning,’ Tuan writes (1977, p. 179).Places are experiential, memorial, emotive, subjective, even poetic

(Bachelard [1958] 1964). Spaces are objective, abstract, measurable,

‘scientific’ and universal. Space in this framework is the alienating and

exploitative handiwork of the capitalist bourgeoisie, bearing the same

relation to place as exchange value does to use value in the Marxian account

of commodities.

Henri Lefebvre’s ‘history’ of the entire period from the Italian

quattrocento through the 20th century is one long rise of the bourgeoisieand its alienating gaze: ‘The outcome has been a brutal and authoritarian

spatial practice, whether Haussmann’s or the later, codified versions of the

Bauhaus or Le Corbusier; what is involved in all cases is the effective

application of the analytic spirit in and through dispersion, division and

segregation’ (1991, p. 308). Lefebvre’s broad brush smears the diverse work

of the Bauhaus (which in the hands of Walter Gropius was deeply social-

democratic) by association with Hausmann’s destruction of Paris and Le

Corbusier’s ill-conceived sterile spaces.

Lefebvre’s thesis of panoptic and authoritarian implications of abstractspace have been echoed in the neo-Marxian writings of David Harvey, and

by a wide range of postcolonial thinkers who trace the abstraction of space

and time to European imperialism (Blaut 1993). The development of

precision clocks and reliable latitude and longitude measurements for

navigation during the 16th and 17th centuries was conducted by imperial,

authoritarian regimes, and by the cultures that invented the racial

categories and generated the brutal boundaries of colonial exploitation.

But the abstract grid of ‘space’ is ultimately a neutral frame, mereinstrumental rationality, not to be confused with the value rationality of a

particular instance of deploying it—to use Max Weber’s important

distinction.



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Technically, flat maps of the globe are not panoptic but orthogonal:

every point is seen from its own perpendicular, so they can be instruments

of subaltern perspectives and multicultural dialogue as substantially as

anything else. Besides, the grid of global spacetime has now becomeinstitutionalized among all cultures, so it is more important to understand

its relation to place, and that task has been accomplished by a thinker

whose intellectual history of the space/place split has now made Lefebvre’s

ideas on abstract space seem obsolete.

In The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997), Edward Casey shows

that place long reigned as the ‘supreme term’ in western thought, but that

‘by the end of the eighteenth century, it vanished altogether from serious

theoretical discourse in physics and philosophy,’ demoted during the rise of

modern science into mere position. Modern natural and social scientificmethod relegates places to mere instances or points in space. In the

Newtonian model infinite space is the foundation and frame that gives

meaning to any given position. All local cases are but variant particularities

to be combed for common patterns that are the golden nuggets extracted

by scientific methods. But Casey convincingly dismantles this denigration

of place by asking: ‘What if things are the other way around? What if the

very idea of spaces is posterior to that of place? . . . . Could place be general

and ‘‘space’’ particular?’ (1996, p. 17). Casey’s starting point is ‘our ownlived body,’ always already emplaced. ‘The body,’ he writes, ‘is the specific

medium for experiencing the place-world’ (p. 24). Bodies, moreover, are

bilateral, with left, right, forward, and backward orientation. In structure

and function, bodies orient, and so all (always embodied) perception and

consciousness is already emplaced. ‘We are never anywhere, anywhen,’

Casey writes, ‘but in place’ (p. 39).

What then is place? ‘A place is more an event than a thing to be

assimilated to known categories,’ Casey writes; it is not ‘a mere patch of

ground, a bare stretch of earth, a sedentary set of stones’ (1996, p. 26).Most usefully, Casey explains that ‘places gather’: ‘Being in a place is

being in a configurative complex of things.’ Furthermore, ‘places also

gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts’ (pp. 24 –

25). Places ‘hold’ and ‘keep’ in Casey’s terminology. Memories ‘belong as

much to the place as to my brain or body’ (p. 25). They are, therefore,

collective phenomena, transformed by the sentient bodies that inhabit,

know, or recognize them. Places are the condition of possibility for

human culture itself: ‘To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit aplace sufficiently intensively to cultivate it . . . . Culture is carried

into places by bodies. To be encultured is to be embodied to begin

with’ (p. 34).

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Casey’s interpretation trumps Lefebvre’s critique of abstract space by

demonstrating the dependence of the abstract time/space binarism on the

primacy of place:

Not only do imperial space and time require recourse to lowly places intheir very definition (rather than conversely), but also the status of spaceand time as equal but opposite terms is put into question by theircommon emplacement. The binarist dogma stretching from Newtonand Leibniz to Kant and Schopenhauer is undone by the basicperception that we experience space and time together in place—inthe locus of a continuous ‘space-time’ that is proclaimed alike intwentieth-century physics, philosophy and anthropology. (1996, p. 37)

Casey’s placeful phenomenology beautifully compliments Simmel’sformal sociology. Through both, we can see how social forms take place,

how they are always in statu nascendi, and why we can find all human

phenomena originally arising in and from places. It is time to recognize that

history must be about those places if it aspires to recount the past.

The Topoi of the Past

We are now ready to understand the relationship between the past, time,and history. Every past is a place (emphatically in the present tense

because the past is always present). All action and experience takes place,

in the sense that it requires place as a prerequisite, and makes place, in the

sense of inscription. Casey draws from Aristotle the observation that it is

impossible to think of a phenomenon or event without thinking of it in

some place. Even a void is a place of nothingness. Places are prior

necessities of all phenomena: place ‘takes precedence of all other things’

(Aristotle, Physics, quoted in Casey 1997, p. 51). Events are places and

vice versa.I propose that we refer to the places of the past as topoi. The noun topos

(place) began its long career in western discourse in the fields of rhetoric

and logic. Our everyday term for any subject of study or concern, ‘topic,’

originates in topos. In Aristotle’s Topics, the first western treatise on logic,

topoi are the logical stratagems for defending or refuting propositions.10

Although Aristotle never explicitly defines the term, it was most likely

borrowed from the widely practiced mnemonic system of using geographic

locations (familiar sites along a road, or rooms within one’s own house) toanchor memories. Thus, the ‘argument form’ necessary for a given

refutation could be quickly retrieved in debate (Slomkowski 1997, pp. 43 –

68; Smith 1997, pp. xxiv – xxx). ‘Each topos serves as a location at which



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many arguments may be found by appropriate substitutions in the relevant

form’ (Smith 1997, p. xxvii).

Ernst Robert Curtius (1948) and Leo Spitzer (1948) simultaneously

recast topoi from the classical and neoclassical traditions into a central toolof 20th-century literary criticism. Their basic idea is that the vast field of

world literature recycles recognizable ‘commonplaces’: the same ‘analogies,

the same bits of doctrine . . . the same modes or lines of proof, the same

myths,’ such as ‘the reference of values to the ambiguous norm of Nature;

the antitheses of nature and art, the simple and the complex, the regular

and the irregular, the uniform and the diverse; the notions of progress,

decline, and cyclical change . . .’ (Crane 1954, pp. 74 – 75). R. S. Crane’s

lucid explication of these recurrent concepts as ‘topoi’ constitutes a

cartographic method that I wish to retain in my usage: ‘. . . Wherever they occur, they represent not so much what the writers in whose treatises,

essays, poems, or novels we find them are thinking about as much as what

they are thinking with.’ Thus, ‘the more broadly learned we are, indeed, the

more correspondences of this kind, linking together parts or brief passages

in writings of the most diverse sorts, we shall be likely to note in the

margins of our books . . .’ (p. 75).

Topoi are recognizable because we can map them within a general

topology of the known or familiar. All action, whether building pyramids,making love, writing, or reading, takes and makes place; all individuals are

the creative authors of their own presence. Reading our environment is a

holistic endeavor, whether in an everyday mode or with the expert methods

of the historian. Each element, every sign, is only legible in relation to the

entire mental map of the world carried within our crania. The cranium also

serves as a referential point-coordinate (perspective). That which has been

brought into legible view, such as any aspect of ‘the past’ (however marked

as such) is by definition something that has been mapped into the network

of known or familiar phenomena. Anything that cannot be mapped isbeyond the event horizon of consciousness.

Topoi collapse time. I use the term topoi to denote the specific places

of the past because it carries the useful metaphoric Aristotelian and New

Criticism traditions, and also the geometric sense of its original usage,

from which the metaphor was originally drawn. For Aristotle as for me,

it is sometimes useful to think metaphorically of places, as places of

memory.11 That familiar understanding (among many others) that I

share with this stranger from ancient Greece places us together in atopological relationship. Known pasts (topoi) are mapped onto other

known topoi, in a process that constitutes a vast multi-perspectival atlas

of world history.

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History is the map of the past, but that map is not merely a

representation. Topoi touch the ground in myriad ways. They are not in

time; they are in space. They can only be discovered, interpreted, and

debated via the coordinates of spacetime. Topoi are not free-floatingsignifiers.

History is the map of past. Its elemental units are topoi. In my latest

vintage of this term, topos signifies the intersection of (lived) place-time and

(natural) spacetime.

History as Cartography

It matters that history takes and makes place because knowing the topoi of

history is literally to map the human past. I mean to expand the meaning of ‘mapping’ very broadly, but I shall not dilute it into merely a suggestive

metaphor. Maps represent the relationships among topoi, be they points,

lines, polygons, or actions, events, experiences, and ideas. Definitions of the

noun and verb form of ‘map’ range from ‘the representation of the earth’s

surface or part of it on a flat surface,’ to the metaphoric ‘conceptualization

or mental representation of the structure, extent, or layout of an area of

experience, field of study, ideology, etc.’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online,

accessed 2005).I can reach Cambridge from Los Angeles by consulting maps depicting

the pathways now in use. I can understand the sense of ‘virtue’ current in

16th-century Cambridge by consulting a range of historical texts that track

the discursive pathways both prior to that place and since. Pocock’s

brilliant The Machiavellian Moment (1975) mapped the vast network of

texts (traces of communicative action) that made ‘virtue’ a powerful

keyword in early modern Europe. Cartography refers to the making of

maps, of course, but there is no official definition of what a map should

look like. It can be pictorial, verbal, or mathematical. The only basicrequirement is that a map depict the topological relationships among topoi,

whether ‘Cambridge’ or ‘virtue.’

Pictorial maps communicate via vocabularies of shape (points, lines,

and polygons), color, tone, and iconography. Those vocabularies are

organized by a syntax comprised of contiguity, scale, paths, distance, area

(zones, regions, boundaries), volume, and legend. Pictorial maps are

typically synchronic ‘snapshots,’ but they can be drawn and even

animated to represent time, motion, and processes. Maps and mappingare today subjected to a critical discourse about the visual representation

of space and place that is epitomized in the multivolume The History of

Cartography (1987 – 2007), edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward,



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and the work both of these late scholars did to clarify the ideological and

ideational constructedness of maps. But, as Jane Azevedo (1997) has

argued, although all maps ‘are constructed with interests in mind’ (p.

108) their validity is not necessarily undermined by that constructionbecause their use value inheres in enabling us to achieve objectives. Even

maps of radically different construction must be ‘deeply compatible’

because ‘a mapping relationship exists between any two maps of the same

territory’ (pp. 107, 144).

Cartography is not inherently flawed because of its reinvention during

the imperial epoch of the European Renaissance. The critique of

Eurocentric, scientific space is an instance of perspectivalism: the

attribution of knowledge or understanding to the social location of the

subject. Perspectivalism along with related concepts of ‘subject positions’and ‘positionality’ (LaCapra 2004, p. 5) have been deployed extensively in

the current crisis of knowledge to undermine the possibility of any objective

or certain knowledge. Postcolonial scholarship has regionalized (Prakash

1999), even provincialized (Chakrabarty 2000) western epistemology (Blaut

1993). Perspective itself now must be subjected to critique of its grounded

metaphoricality in order to understand subject positions as topoi that can

be mapped. Mapping cartography is vital to my proposal to rethink

historical interpretation as a form of mapping.We owe to Hayden White (1973, 1985) our map of the ‘tropics’ of

historical discourse. White influentially explicated the ways that irony,

metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche supply the four basic ‘tropes’ by

which historians arrange data about the past. He further claimed that

historians arbitrarily ‘emplot’ these data as Romance, Tragedy, Comedy,

and Satire. But we have labored too long under the shadow of White’s

radical skepticism about the value of the data themselves as sources of

historical knowledge. Following the same faulty pathways through the

linguistic turn as so many modernists and postmodernists, White failed tosee that the past takes place, and that textual narrative is not the only way to

present the places of the past. I propose that we move from White’s

‘metahistorical’ tropics toward a topology of the past. His tropics, after all,

are clear cases of topoi as are his own interventions. Cartography’s infinitely

possible figurations cannot be reduced to narrative form. Indeed, a

cartographic history can escape the narrative topoi of White’s historical

epistemology.

It should be very clear by this point that I am not talking about thetraditional field of historical geography, although that field is certainly not

irrelevant (Baker 2003). Instead, I am claiming that the incalculable volume

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of historical writing on all subjects should be thought of as a map because

the past can only be known by placing it, and the way of knowing places is

to map them. The emplacement of all human action presumes locations in

spacetime, which materializes each place. The ‘landscape of history,’ toreturn to Gaddis’ phrase, proves to be far more than a useful analogy. By

interrogating the temporality of history, we have revealed experience as the

intersection of place and space, which is also the intersection of human and

natural time. Recognizing the placefulness of pastness indicates a clear

pathway around the blockades raised by the linguistic turn.

Mapping is the form of interpretation that historians practice. Their

hermeneutic operation is intrinsically cartographic, or possibly choreographic,

for all life is movement, despite the conceptual utility (as in Benjamin) of

freezing it photographically. However daunting may seem the prospect of ‘mapping’ such intangible topoi as love, greed, faith, ambition, racism, justice

(and all the various forms of cultural cognition that historians must address),

the task is unavoidable given that all human actions inscribe topoi, and every

topos is simultaneously locatable and meaningful.

Conclusions

What does ‘placing the past’ accomplish? How does this formulationamount to more than a clever new phrase, renaming what we already

know? First, I hope that by adding the ingredient of spatiality to the

pragmatic-hermeneutic tradition, grafted back into that tradition by way of

its lost relative Georg Simmel, we can strengthen recent postpositivist work

in the pragmatic tradition (Bernstein 1983; Appleby et al . 1994;

Kloppenberg 1996; Hacking 1999, 2002).

Because it pivots on the concept of grounded metaphors, the method

of placing the past could be called neo-foundational. Placing the past

recognizes no boundary between natural and human inquiry, because alltopoi are placeful spacetimes, both meaningful and measurable. The

knowing subject is the material world reaching back to itself. Placing the

past does not depend on Cartesian dualisms, like John Searle’s case for

‘external reality’ (Searle 1995). I propose that the coordinates of

spacetime (using any generally recognized system) are a post-foundational

universal, not as a natural truth, but much better: as historical institution.

Placing the past anchors dialogic reason to universal, mappable criteria.

Placing the past takes ‘the past’ out of time, locates it in materializedtopoi, and asserts that history, in any symbolic system, is the map of these

topoi.



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Acknowledgements

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the organizers of, and participants in, four

forums in which I presented the earlier formulations of this essay: JoanNeuberger and David Crew at the University of Texas, Austin (September

2003); Lourdes Roca and Fernado Aguaya at the Instituto de Investiga-

ciones Dr José Marı́a Luis Mora (‘El Mora’) in Mexico City (October 2003);

José Marı́a Cardesin at the Universidad de La Coruña, Spain (November

2005); and Kathleen Canning and William Rosenberg at the Institute for

Historical Studies at the University of Michigan (September 2006). For

their critical comments on earlier drafts, my thanks also to Richard Fox,

Jason Glenn, Valerie Kivelson, James Kloppenberg, David Levitus, David

Lloyd, Carol Mangione, Steve Ross, Vanessa Schwartz, Brooke Selling,Binky Walker, and an anonymous reader. A special thanks to my infinitely

patient and encouraging editor, David Harlan.

Notes

[1] Siân Reynolds’ translation of this crucial passage is revealing, however. Braudel’s

1949 original of the italicized phrase reads ‘une histoire quasi-immobile,’ which

could well have been translated as ‘a history somewhat fixed in place’ (Braudel

1949, p. xiii).

[2] The first universal standard established was that in 1889 by the Bureau Inter-

national des Poids et Mesures, an ‘artifact unit’ prototype of a meter made from

platinum and iridium and stored under glass in a cool, dry place in Sèvres, France.

Intolerably subject nonetheless to expansion and contraction, the stately thing was

replaced in 1960 and again in 1983 by the 11th and 17th Resolutions of the CGPM,

respectively. See SI Brochure, Section 2.1.1.1, www.bipm.fr/, under ‘metre.’

[3] Jorge Luis Borges makes a powerful case against ‘time’ in this way, drawing

explicitly on Bergson (and Berkeley, and himself) in his anguished and evocative

essay ‘A New Refutation of Time’ ([1944, 1948], 1962).

[4] Literally, ‘The moment where I speak is already far from me,’ but idiomatically,‘Just as I speak the moment is already far from me.’

[5] To the asymmetry of time we might add the asymmetry of spatial and temporal

metaphors: time is metaphorized as space, but never vice versa.

[6] ‘What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs,

answers, ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I

am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling’

(Heidegger [1951] 1993, p. 349).

[7] Edward Soja (1996) has added neologism to obscurity by enthusiastically

rechristening these triads ‘trialectics.’

[8] Lefebvre never mentions Simmel in The Production of Space (1974); Soja (1989,p. 33) mentions him only in passing.

[9] On Simmel’s infuriating failure to use footnotes, and his failure to acknowledge

Dilthey, see Frisby (1992, p. 37).

488 P. J. Ethington


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[10] The lengthy list of these topoi begins in Book 2. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge

translates topoi as ‘commonplace rules’ throughout the translation included by

Jonathan Barnes in The Complete Works of Aristotle (Aristotle 1984, vol. 1, pp.

167 – 277).

[11] ‘Aristotle’ is no longer a man, nor even merely a text. ‘Aristotle’ is a pluralinstitution, a vast array of topoi in popular, religious, and expert discourses.

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